Blunkett’s Home Office and the Truth about Crime

norman dennis, 18 December 2004

Now that Mr Blunkett is no longer Home Secretary, can we expect some slight remission in the flow of nonsense on crime from the Home Office?
In the past few months the Home Office has taken to chanting the mantra that crime is at a historically low level. That’s on the childhood principle, presumably, that if you say something three times it’s true. The culture and technical constraints of radio and television make it virtually impossible to secure a public airing of the clear facts that contradict that ridiculous falsehood. They’re “statistics” and they’re “complicated”. The matter is settled with the most aggressive sound-bite or by the authoratative plausibility of the official spokesperson.
Yet if we look no further than London–the Metropolitan Police Area, for which the Home Office is directly responsible–real history has a different tale to tell.

Let’s not open ourselves to the accusation of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the Home Office by dwelling on the fact that in 1906 there were fewer than 20,000 crimes in London. But it was the Home Office that invoked “history”, not me.
When Mr Blunkett was born in 1947 there were still only 127,000 crimes a year in London.
Even in 1960 there were only 188,000.
For 2004, without the December figure, the figure is 965,000.
And the crime figures are … historically low?
With a repetititve absurdity that competes with that of “historically low” crime figures, the Home Office assures us also that crime in the capital is falling.
The Home Office’s own published statistics show that:
in the year 2000 there were 1,007,000 crimes in London.
In 2001 there were 1,043,000.
In 2002 there were 1,082,000.
In 2003 there were 1,058,000.
And in 2004, even if the December figure is as low 75,000 (very unlikely), the figure will be 1,040,000.
So there has been an increase of 33,000 crimes since the year 2000. (Remember, there were fewer than 20,000 crimes in total in 1906!)
Crime “is falling” is a phrase that means there is a trend. As compared with last year there has been a tiny reduction on 1 million crimes of, at best, 18,000 crimes.
The London crime figures rose in both March and April 2004 as compared with March and April 2003.
The latest figure is for November 2004. In November the crime figure rose as compared with November 2003 from 86,900 to 88,400.
And crime … is falling?
Everyone would like there to be a trend. But by no stretch of anybody’s imagination outside of the Home Office under Mr Blunkett is it a trend yet.
The Home Office has been adept in recent years at producing alternative sets of figures, with the effect of muddying all public discussion.
In the case of the London crime numbers, there is no alternative set of figures. These are the figures they rely on, and can only be relying on, when they prate about “historically low” crime, and “crime falling”, and when Home Office ministers (and even, incredibly, the occasional academic!) appear on television to say the same.
Perhaps the most distasteful bit of responsibility-shedding by the Home Office has been the line that the fear of crime is as much the problem as the fact of crime. It’s the populist and hysterical tabloids, stupid. It’s the nervous old biddies, stupid.
The fact is that the totally reasonable fear of crime has undoubtedly been one of the main factors in preventing the crime figures being even worse.
The enormous rise in burglaries has been restrained by people making their homes into fortresses. Old people are mugged less than young people because they do not venture out into public spaces at night. Cars have been rendered much more difficult to steal than they were ten years ago.
Where the reasonable fear of crime cannot be accompanied by practical measures to secure one’s own safety, as in the above examples, and safety has depended on the policing policies of the Home Office, the results on the streets of London (with bolted and alarmed houses, now the results on the door-step; and with securely locked parked cars, now the results in hijacking) have been disastrous.
Some inroads have been belatedly made in the street robbery figures. But there were still 1,000 more street robberies in the first 11 months of 2004 than there had been in the first eleven months of 2000, up from 32,700 to 33,700.
And on the Home Office’s beloved “crime is at a historially low” point, from 1893 to 1941 there were never more than 400 robberies in total in the whole of England and Wales, never mind a rise of 1,000 in five years in London alone.
Perhaps Mr Clarke will take the opportunity offered by Mr Blunkett’s departure, therefore, to spend more time over known facts and useful remedies, and less time with Pollyanna propaganda and macho bluster.